One of the unexpected side benefits of my poem-a-day month has been that I have found myself using the poem prompts almost as I would journal prompts. You can look back over the 22 poems I’ve written (yes, I’m a little behind) and get a pretty good sense of my emotional state in the past few weeks, the days when I’ve been down and the days when I’ve been up.
Blogging has been a wonderful tool and definitely made me a better writer, but for me, it’s never been a confessional-style journaling tool. I’m not a blood-and-guts kind of blogger, preferring to save my most revealing moments for longer-form work. I’ve published poems and essays about my life, but that’s not what blogging has ever been about for me, even though I knew it would limit me as far as popularity. I don’t see this as “emotionally shut down,” but simply as self-awareness about what I want blogging to be, and how I want to function as a writer. I want you, my readers, to feel like you know me, but not like you know all of me.
So the poems I’ve been writing, which are all attempts to capture certain moments or emotions, have really been valuable to me, personally and as a writer. As a poet, I like some of what I’m coming up with, but even more, I’m finding some of that release that every diarist knows, when we hit upon the exact right word that expresses what we’re feeling, and our soul feels a little lighter. It’s a nice combination, and I’m trying to think of ways to keep it going after my month is over. I know Poetic Asides does a Wednesday Poetry Prompt, and I’m wondering what else I might be able to find.
Related articles
- Poetry and Pockets! (pm27.wordpress.com)
- An Interview with James Dewar, Poet (cherylandrews.wordpress.com)
(please buy a copy of that if you don’t already have it, whether you use my link or not). The value of the shitty first draft is overcoming procrastination and perfectionism and getting something down on paper without worrying about whether it’s good yet or not. According to Lamott, every good writer has to do these drafts before you get to the good drafts, and I think I’m not alone in finding this reassuring. There’s a version of this sentiment at work in 
for the first time. I’ve also long been a fan of Neruda, but the rest of the authors on my proposed list will be new for me, and I’m looking forward to diving in. Right now I’m reading 
to see if I would want to teach it, and I think I’ll try 
next, as I’ve been really intrigued by the descriptions of the works within. In conjunction with developing this course, I have plans to refresh my knowledge of Spanish, which I haven’t studied formally since high school. My dream would be to have enough fluency by next spring to read some of the literature in the original, and I’m hoping to increase our conversations in Spanish here at home. I’m also very lucky to have a theater-teaching colleague who’s going to hook me up with some contemporary plays by Latin American female authors, since my proposed list is light on women.
as jumping-off point, and another speaks of 
and 
, would offer plenty of choices, and I trust his judgement for quality and appropriateness. Also, this way I wouldn’t need to scavenge through my own collection, but I could always supplement if I felt like it. I’ll have to think more about it, but so far, it’s a very attractive idea.
